K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

Eight lost Openbox themes

Edit: Ironically, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.

A long time ago I found some Openbox themes that were made by a person named Sebastian Sareyko, who had a string of home pages at http://smoon.homelinux.org/, http://nooms.de and http://sareyko.net/. All of those sites are abandoned now and I don’t know if Sebastian has another home. It’s a shame because some of those themes were quite nice, and unless they’re hosted elsewhere, a lot of that work is gone.

I got lucky yesterday and found a few of the pages filed at archive.org, including some of the original .tar.gz files that held Sebastian’s themes. Here are the ones I could find, download and validate; it seems archive.org couldn’t (or just didn’t) stash some of them, and the files I downloaded were just empty stock HTML pages renamed to fill the file target.

All of these date back to around 2006 or so, which means they’re technically pre-Openbox 3.4.x themes. I haven’t had any problem using them in 3.4.7.2 though.

This is Blat, which has a dark title bar and light borders with custom buttons.

This would probably look nice against a dark wallpaper, with a light blue accent.

Here’s Distant, which uses blue with a faint off-white accent, making it a very artsy theme.

Distant comes with a matching GTK theme (not shown in the image) that uses the Clearlooks engine, and a 1280×1024 PNG wallpaper that matches the theme. It’s a nice set.

LookClear is one of the originals I wanted, so I’m happy to find this one. This is an early Clearlooks knockoff for Openbox; I happen to prefer this over the bundled Clearlooks theme just because I find it a little less obtrusive.

It’s not so glossy as to offend my Openbox tastes (I like flat effects with solid color themes, usually), so I find myself using that one frequently.

Malk is a white-based theme, with some faint blue effects for a polar feel to it.

I don’t usually use white themes or wallpaper, just because I have a few faint scratches in the center of my LCD, and very dark or very light backgrounds tend to make those nicks visible. Dumb reason, huh?

Next is Nyz, which has a thick border with black-and-blue shades.

It’s a bit cartoony for my tastes; if I use it I’ll probably drop the gradients and pick a sharper blue. Sometimes those thicker borders appeal to me though.

This one is Twice, which is a sister to Nyz, but shades of red instead of blue.

I have the same impression of this one as I do of Nyz — interesting, but would need a little work to suit me.

This is an oddball theme, and it doesn’t look like much. I’m only including it because I could download it intact, even if it doesn’t seem to be a viable option. gehtehkah, if I understand the theme notes, is supposed to mimic your GTK color scheme by implanting color variables into the Openbox theme.

It’s a nice idea, but as you can see there, it doesn’t completely work for me. Of course, I didn’t export those variables or modify them at all, which means they’re empty, which means they’re set to zero, or #000000 — black on black. If you can get it to behave as it was intended, let me know.

The last one is my favorite, and it’s the reason I went on this little quest: oPerfection. I like this one, partly because it matches the gPerfection GTK theme and gperfection2 icon theme, but also because it’s another soft gradient that doesn’t offend my Openbox sensibilities.

I install this one with the other two ?{p,P}erfection* sets and set the background to #919373, and my OB workspace is complete.

I zipped all these and put them here, in hopes that they’ll survive another couple of years of use. I don’t have a box-look.org account (yet), but I’ll probably add them later, if I can find the time. If you can do it for me I would be obliged; please make a point of crediting Sebastian, which is just the right thing to do. Enjoy! :D

P.S.: Of course, if anyone knows where Sebastian’s site has moved to, or if these themes are available elsewhere, please let me know. Cheers!

Oh, I really forgot about these themes. They’re still hosted on http://nooms.de/ though, it is just not too easy to find them. The malk theme, for example, can be found at . I’ll turn on directory listing for http://nooms.de/openbox/ until I finally find the time to move everything to the new site.

The gehtehkah theme needs a patched version of openbox to work properly. The patch is still available but pretty old and I doubt it works with recent versions of Openbox (haven’t tried though). With the patch applied it is possible to use GTK+ theme colors in your Openbox themes. For example, http://nooms.de/2007-01-25.jpg and http://nooms.de/jada.png are both showing the gehtehkah theme.

smoon: Yay! Great! That’s much better than my zipped file. And it would be nice to see that GTK-trick working in the newer versions of Openbox. Maybe someone close to the OB inner circle will mention it.